Dinner With The Palmers
by zetsuboushita27
Summary: Just your average meal with the Palmer family, if by average you mean excruciatingly unexplainable. Based around information learned in episode 33-Cassette and 67-[Best Of?], if by information you mean painfully weird assumptions and half-explanations that make less sense the more you think about them. Enjoy


The vast, soulless desert held nothing but empty winds and towering dunes. Pristine and untouched planes of golden white sand lay as of yet uninhabited, and distant shadows lurked at the edges of the flat, undiscovered non reality of what had yet remained unnamed but would soon become the beautiful, bustling little town of Night Vale.

Amidst this mind-bending nothingness sat a quiet, content and momentarily incomplete family of two, or maybe three- none of them could ever quite recall- eating dinner awkwardly around a table made of wood that had come from trees that hadn't yet grown.

"Mom," said Abby, her words ringing with a sour aftertaste causing visible disturbances in the soupy air. She paused. "Mom!" she repeated, louder this time and with more than a trace of irritation.

"Yes, dear?" her mother replied absently, blinking as she awoke dizzily from a dreamlike train of thought, and also because a lame gust of wind had blown a few strands of hair and a small amount of sand across her eyes. The sun's faint whistle could be heard, once a whistle of merriment, now a whistle of obligation. Silence, as yellow as the invisible corn that would one day be grown there wasn't, embraced the whistle gently.

"Cecil turns fifteen tomorrow."

"I know, sugar."

"He wants a microphone set."

"Still set on that job at the Radio Station?" their mother wondered, her eyes turning glassy.

Abby's elder brother snorted. "I've told him, he hasn't got the voice for it." A soft breeze blew his words away. The wind went right through him.

Abby heard a soft sound and looked up to see her younger brother Cecil standing over them. Their mother noticed soon after, and, unsure of how long he'd been standing there, started slightly, her eyes still distant and unfocused, her hazy expression masked with dubious concern.

"Don't listen to your brother, Cecil?" she said, ending the supposed solace with an upwards inflection; even as she said it, doubt clouded her frail mind. With an earth-shattering clatter like a chainsaw through the thick yellow silence, her fork fell gracelessly to her plate. She noticed her hand shaking violently.

"My brother? Mom… are you okay?" Cecil asked softly, noticing his sister's rapidly building annoyance. He, however, felt only a shallow, underlying sadness when he looked at his mother.

"What? Cecil, you don't… Never mind. Never mind. Don't worry. Don't w…"

"Where have you been, Ceec?" Abby interrupted swiftly, feeling the atmosphere begin to splinter like wood stricken of moisture.

"Practicing my segment. I'm getting real good, Abby, real good at saying the right stuff, just like Leonard Burton. Maybe one day he'll let me intern!" Cecil said breathlessly, glad someone had finally asked. He seemed proud of himself; seeing her brother happy made Abby, for some reason, feeling an aching sadness deep in her core. Just as she was about to reply, her elder brother scoffed again, and she shot him a glare that sliced through the moist, heated air with graceful ease.

"What? He's never gonna get an internship, Abs, he sucks."

"Ignore him," said their mom quietly.

"Ignore who?" Cecil and Abby said in perfect unison, glancing at each other fearfully as the cracks in their mother's mentality became more and more defined, spreading and forking off in different directions until they began to rival the thin valleys in the dry, malnourished sand wastes beneath them.

"What? Never mind him. Don't fret, Cecil, sit down and eat your dinner. It'll get cold. Don't listen to him, Cecil." She began to rock very gently side to side, humming a simple yet haunting melody in a scratchy, uneven buzz.

"So, Cecil, you excited? I can't believe you're going to be fifteen!" Abby interrupted once again in a loud deliberate tone that made Cecil slightly nervous. Smiling falsely, he stood a cautious seat next to his sister and began to pick silently at his food.

"Oh, um, I can't wait!" he exclaimed brightly, hearing the pretence in his own voice before the words had even left his mouth. "It's come around so quickly."

"Hasn't it?"

A low buzz sounded in the air from afar, sending faint vibrations across the carefully laid table. The china rattled. A drop of water spilled from Cecil's cup and splashed softly onto the tablecloth next to his plate. He stared at it in dismay.

Cecil glanced across the table with oddly misty eyes, taking in the nonchalant look on his brother's twisted expression, and noting with gentle concern the layer of guilt frosting his smug eyes. Shifting his gaze to beyond his brother, Cecil noticed layers of faded, grainy mountains rising up behind him in an elegant pattern, seeming as two dimensional as a gritty screen and smudged and scratched so much it was almost beyond recognition. He blinked slowly and the jagged landscape flickered and melted away into the shimmering heat of the endless desert.

"Why are you staring at me?" Cecil's brother asked indignantly. Abby's head jerked round to face her mother.

"Cecil, quit staring at him. Leave each other alone, boys, you're only making it worse," their mom said pusillanimously in a quiet voice.

Abby stared at her in disbelief for a long while; her little brother stood abruptly, knocking his china plate flying to the dry, cracked earth. It shattered and the noise echoed endlessly across the flat nonreality of the barren landscape surrounding them on all sides- even the horizon quivered as the sound reached it. Cecil's mother stared at in in mute horror, her entire form seizing up as the sound bounced around incessantly inside her fragile skull; she began to shake, her soft trembling worsening into violent convulsions, her deep violet eyes widening in shock.

"Mom!" Cecil vociferated. "Stop! Just stop it, please!"

"Ceec," Abby whispered. Her voice shattered midway through the familiar syllable.

"Please. Why are you… Mom, listen to me!" he pled, desperation sweating through the pores in his words. He repeated the same words again and again as his mother began to lightly howl; his words grew louder as her keens did. Abby harshly rested her head against the table. She slowly peeked up from the bed of her weary arms to see her elder brother laughing, an infernal laugh that followed him as he ran off towards the mountains that lay uncertainly in the distance, the dark shapes illuminated by the rapid heliotrope-coloured sunset and a faint red light blinking gently far, far away.


End file.
